Revenue Operations for Manufacturing Companies
What is RevOps and how can it transfrom manufacturing sales & marketing?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a modern approach to designing and managing how your go-to-market teams do their jobs. It has been rapidly adopted in the software world, but most manufacturing companies have not yet invested in it.
Hyperscayle built our RevOps framework to explain how it works and a Maturity Model that you can use to diagnose the current state of revenue operations at your company.
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Hyperscayle defines Revenue Operations as a holistic approach to the design and execution of Go-To-Market processes and systems across the lead-to-cash lifecycle.
The main problems RevOps helps to solve for manufacturing:
Manual sales process: many organizations in this industry suffer from poor visibility into their overall pipeline and lack of clarity on specific deals. Often there is a high reliance on relationship selling and tribal knowledge from tenured change-resistant salespeople, making it hard to implement process improvements or scale the sales team
Technology debt: this ugly beast rears its head in manufacturing companies in a number of ways. Often the core challenges are related to misconfiguration or a lack of a CRM, which exacerbates data hygiene and data governance challenges as data moves inefficiently (or not at all) from one platform to another. Inadequate and/or disconnected tools combined with the inability to action data-driven insights is unfortunately commonplace.
Insufficient specialized expertise: many companies in the manufacturing sector maintain an "IT-led" approach to sales and marketing technology. This foments an environment where MOPs/SOPs (RevOps) often find their ability to progress on key objectives is hamstrung by the overarching IT priorities of the business. When marketing, sales and customer success are prevented from collaborating efficiently and from owning their own technical path forward, existing frustrations are further exacerbated.
Reduced return on the investment: due to the persistent process, technology, data and expertise challenges listed above -- manufacturing companies frequently struggle to obtain reasonable time-to-value on new investments, whether that may be in terms of human capital or new technology. It's very difficult for talented people to make a rapid impact (same for new tech) when the current is pulling them backwards instead of forward.
Prepare for the digital future: all of the factors above begin to stack up rapidly for legacy businesses and can make modernizing exponentially more difficult with each passing year. Companies who do not get on a path towards the future are finding it very hard to attract top talent in today's competitive hiring environment. Sales people and marketers in the prime their careers cannot easily be hired into key roles when the organization has not made a clear commitment to the future.
The RevOps Framework
To us, Revenue Operations includes marketing operations, sales operations, customer success operations, channel operations, and finance operations.
Our view of an ideal RevOps function is NOT like silos bolted together, but rather as steps along a unified process tied to business growth goals. Read the article.
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Make sure your RevOps team is equipped to be a force multiplier for your leadership team’s strategy. This starts by ensuring GTM efforts are guided by a well-formulated operating plan that is revisited throughout the year, including accurate reporting structured in a way that’s actionable for making decisions about the business. Read the article.
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We believe in “Process First.” This is one of the most important principles for Revenue Operations and (unfortunately) one of the most forgotten. Companies often try to solve problems by buying new technology or adding team members without first ensuring their business process is set up correctly. It’s one of the most common mistakes we see people make. Read the article.
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Decide how large a team you need and whether they report to the CMO, CRO, or IT leader. Will you build out a complete RevOps team and keep all work in-house, outsource your RevOps function entirely, or something in between? The correct answers will change as you grow. Consider what core skills you need in your in-house team, and then outsource projects that require more specialized skills.
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The technology stack you’re using today likely consists of multiple categories of tools. It’s important to make the right technology choices for your stage and company type, and that you have the right mix of tools without paying for redundant functionality. Marketing automation and CRM are important, as well as Data Enrichment, Data Orchestration, Sales Enablement, and Middleware or Integration software. Read the article.
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The state of your data, and whether you have an agreed-upon single source of truth is one of the most fundamental requirements for any company. If you have a data problem but don’t address it, your operations team probably spends hours crafting and correcting basic reports every week, and it gets progressively harder to add new functionality and update systems as you grow. Improve your data foundation before launching into other projects. Read the article.
RevOps Maturity Model
Have you ever analyzed the maturity of Revenue Operations at your company?
The RevOps Maturity Model describes how an organization’s RevOps maturity evolves as it scales. It’s important to invest in strong capabilities before the lack of them slows you down. However, it's equally as important to not overinvest in headcount and technology before you really need it.
That's why we built the Maturity Model, to introduce a framework of how to best prioritize RevOps investments as a company grows and changes according to its stage. Read the article.
Key takeaways of the RevOps Maturity Model:
• Framework for how to optimize RevOps in any scaling company
• Key principles to consider as you build your capabilities
• What good looks like for RevOps at each stage of growth
• Common pitfalls to avoid when building a RevOps team
• How to evaluate the current RevOps maturity of your company
Client Story: 6 River Systems
B2B Manufacturing & Services company builds sales and marketing foundation and customized quote to cash system
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6 River Systems (6RS) makes warehouse automation robotics and fulfilment solutions
Company had grown primarily through industry relationships, but now needed to build a true marketing & sales function to scale further
Existing sales reps were experienced, but operated independently without a common process
Lack of visibility to pipeline, marketing channel performance, sales activity, and customer health.
Frequent mistakes in quoting resulted in hundreds of thousands of lost dollars every year
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Implemented HubSpot marketing hub to establish first enterprise marketing automation. Including campaign hierarchy, lead scoring & routing
Redesigned sales team organizational structure (modifying GEO’s & inside vs. outside mix) to better fit target market and cover target accounts
Implemented Salesforce CRM and integrated with HubSpot
Implemented Salesloft and integrated with Salesforce
Redesigned quote to cash process, built executive buy in and implemented Salesforce revenue cloud to go live with new CPQ system
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Overview
Achieved best practice RevOp systems and process across the lead to cash lifecycle
Systems
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Salesforce CRM
Salesloft
Salesforce Revenue Cloud
Value
Greatly improved lead response time through new CRM and integration with Salesloft
New sales org and territories resulted in 20% increase in target account penetration
CPQ system allowed them to eliminate over $500k annual cost due to faulty quotes
MATT O’BRIEN
SVP of Sales
“Hyperscayle were great partners as we matured our Revenue Operations capability at 6 River Systems. Over the course of our engagement they worked closely with our team to improve our operations across the lead to cash lifecycle, including marketing automation, CRM, and redesigning our entire quote to cash process.”
When is the right time to implement an enterprise CRM?
As your company grows you reach a point where it makes sense to mature the selling process by adding or upgrading a CRM tool. In a lot of cases, manufacturing companies have a selling process that is ad-hoc and driven by tribal knowledge and basic tools like Word Docs and Excel spreadsheets.
Eventually, you'll outgrow them and realize you need to implement a more robust CRM system to continue growing and support new salespeople.
However, managing the implementation of a top-notch CRM is easier said than done. If you don't have a team of experts in-house who have done multiple implementations already, you're probably going to need some outside help.
We created this RevOps Maturity Self-Assessment Survey to help you identify and rank your organization’s maturity. Please complete the survey and reach out to us for guidance and clarification on the ranking.